Articles & Op-Eds

U.S. Congressional leaders Thursday called the suspected terrorist attacks on London commuters earlier in the day "cowardly" and "barbaric".
The U.S. Congress is in a week-long recess, but congressmen and senators were quick to react to the attacks through their press offices.

We are writing to request that you submit a FY 2005 supplemental funding request adding at least $1.3 billion to address the shortfall in veterans’ health care funding that your Administration has identified.

The idea of creating personal accounts for U.S. workers' Social Security taxes won't be axed until President Bush declares it dead, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa said Wednesday.

A key House committee reversed President Bush's fifth attempt to give unequal raises to military and civilian employees in a voice vote this week - a decision that the rest of Congress and the president likely will uphold.

Local law enforcement officials decried Thursday huge budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration to a national network of drug-interdiction task forces, including one that provided more than $12 million to the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area this year.

The House Appropriations Committee yesterday approved a 3.1 percent pay raise next year for civil service employees, continuing a long-standing practice of providing a raise equal to that planned for the military.

Today, the United States possesses the most efficient public sector in the world, one whose mission is to execute the public policies of the nation without regard to politics or party, serve and protect the American people, and save taxpayer money.

A bipartisan group of House members plans to send a letter today to the chairman and ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee to urge them to support "pay parity" raises next year for civil service and military personnel.

As President Bush and administration officials look back on their campaign to sell privatized Social Security, it is increasingly clear that Americans are just not buying. And after the president's recent press conference, in which he proposed large benefit cuts, the American people are even more skeptical.

House Democrats are turning to the Internet to bolster their outreach to young Americans on Social Security, hoping to wage a counteroffensive against the Bush administration’s targeting of twentysomething voters in its fight to enact private retirement accounts.

Led by Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), House Democrats will use tax-filing week as the kickoff for their latest initiative. Hoyer said Tuesday that Democrats will attempt to show in the coming days and months that they are the true “party of reform” and that, despite the GOP rhetoric, Republicans have only made the tax system more complicated and unjust.

Last week's White House fact sheet on Social Security contains anything but the facts. It asserts that by 2027 the government will somehow have to come up with an extra $200 billion a year, and by 2033, more than $300 billion.

As members of Congress wage intellectual and policy battles over the future of Social Security, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) went to La Plata on Tuesday to make his case against privatizing parts of the program.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) waded into Republican territory yesterday, releasing a whip count of 29 Republicans he says are on record opposing “all or major parts of President Bush’s plan” for Social Security reform.